working towards perfection (and failing)

Tag: worry

It’s about ten past nine in the morning. I’m asleep in bed. Daylight streams through the curtains and a cat is curled up against my tummy. Somebody shakes me on the shoulder. It is Blokey. I’ve been made redundant, he calmly announces.

We’ve been here before. We will survive it again.

*sigh*

In the meantime, my summer holidays have just begun and he’s under my feet. Humpf. Best laid plans, and all that fandangly jazz.

He’s relatively nonplussed. He wasn’t keen on the work anyway and is worth far more than he was being paid. He’s spent the day updating his CV and posting it on job-sites. He’s already had a call from an agency and may get an interview at the beginning of next week. He’s also already sent his CV and a covering letter off for another position.

I don’t hate many things; it’s an exhausting feeling to have and tends to compound issues rather than solve them. But you, dear Halloween, I’m prepared to make an exception for.

I don’t understand you. When I was a child the only people in merry old England who ‘celebrated’ you were those who simply wanted to cause trouble, teenagers who didn’t want treats and were far more interested in the tricking aspect. Recently the Halloween phenomena has become big business here as we try desperately to catch up with our American cousins and outdo the neighbours in terms of who has the biggest, scariest pumpkin and the better sweets.

For someone like me it’s horrid. I await knocks on the door with trepidation, even on a normal day, even when I’m expecting someone round. I live in a quiet {but built up} area and the most noise we get on a normal day is a bunch of screeching kids going past on their bikes. Two seconds of mayhem. You cause hours of mayhem.

But perhaps the most terrible thing about you, dear Halloween, is the worry. Should we stay in or go out? If we stay in and don’t answer the door will the car get egged? Do we embrace our staying in with the lights blazing or do we toddle off to bed at 4PM and stay there shaking till we’re sure everybody else is safely tucked up in bed too?

If there was a campaign to delete the 31st October from the world’s calendars I would be its president.

Why is that woman (the checkout girl) talking to me? She’s going to expect me to reply and I’ll get all twisty tongue-tied, my cheeks will glow scarlet and I’ll spit in her face!

That lorry is really close. That lorry is frighteningly close. Oh my goodness, that lorry is going to kill me. (It’s just overtaking.)

It’s raining. What will my poor pussies do? They’re going to die!

The little things panic me. My head is a constant mess of ‘what ifs’ and ‘oh my gods’.

However, give me something HUGE to worry about and I’ll just sit back and let it all wash over me. I’m not sure if that’s because I can genuinely cope with the big stuff, or because my head pretends it isn’t happening; my own personal little internal bodyguard. Bless.

I barely remember the day where I stopped being a Miss and became a possession Mrs. I have vague recollections of being a little perturbed, but I was so happy to be getting hitched (who’d have thought that someone would ever want me) that I spent the lead up to – and the day itself – in a little bubble of pure optimism. Likewise, when I donated my cute little left kidney to Blokey there was no hint of worry. I knew that bad things could happen and instead of worrying, I embraced the thoughts and prepared for the worst. I stressed out about the little things instead, the enemas and the catheters (which, it transpired, were the least troubling parts of the whole process.)

This year has been rather like a ‘big day ahead‘; it’s been … faulty. The knot in my chubby little belly has failed in its attempts to uncurl and the tension in my neck is slowly killing me. To relax I’ve taken to lounging around. I’m particularly partial to lying in a bubble bath, reading books aimed at young adults. If I’m alone I’ll sing songs very loudly. I haven’t done this very much recently. I need to rectify that. Oddly, I also clean and tidy, somewhat manically. And I move things around. It soothes my mind.

I’d like this year to be over now. I’m unsure what the next three months will bring and if I could wake up tomorrow and find that it’s January the first, my happiness would probably be akin to the joy felt by toddlers as they jump in muddy puddles on wet days.

Or, at the very least, I’d like access to a time machine so that I can return to my teenagehood and stomp around moaning about life being unfair and exams being too hard. Because honey, you have no idea just how tough your life is going to get!

I am the biggest (and bestest) worry-wort in the entire kingdom of Earthdom. I can, and will, worry about anything. I am also the biggest (and bestest) ‘head in sand’ burier.

As a rule, ‘worrier’ and ‘if I can’t see it, it will go away’ do not compliment each other.

*sigh*

I am currently worrying about the hoover (it broke), the shower (it broke, came back to life and broke again), my job (which won’t be my job from September, regardless of whether or not they accept my application for voluntary redundancy), Mog (he has a new friend and they were accidentally introduced a tad too early), our new car (the alarm went off on Saturday night and we don’t know why) and … hmmm, gosh. Everything really.

But we’re going to buy a new hoover, the man should be coming to look at the shower, I hate my job, Mog barely even flinched when he bumped into Dora, and the alarm hasn’t gone off again and was probably just being overly sensitive and picking up a lorry thundering past on the main road half a mile (as the crow flies) or so away.

I wind myself up and create little knots of tension all over my body. I live with a constant feeling of nausea in my belly. I’m an idiot. I need a massage, but I’ve never had a massage and so I’m not actually sure that do I need one. Of course, why have a massage when all I’m going to do is worry about it?

I often wonder how – and to a lesser extent, why – people can be so laid-back and easy. Other folk would laugh about the hoover. They wouldn’t think of the worst-case scenario with regards the (five month old) shower, they would just get on the phone and get someone round to sort it. Hate your job? Good for you for leaving! Mog is a cat, not a child; he doesn’t need to be molly-coddled. They would simply take the car back to the dealership and demand it gets fixed if the alarm is too senstive.

But they’re not me, and I’m not them. I don’t know how to fully relax and let the weight of the world simply wash over me. Relaxation is a completely alien concept; if I have nothing to worry about then worry about nothing I will. Or I’ll make something up to worry about.

Did the house just make a strange noise? Yikes! It must be falling down!